Today I am reading stories on the internet, which is one of the better uses of a drizzly July Monday. The first two I stumbled across ended up being my favorites, and incidentally were both written by people named Friedman. The first is by Friedman comma Ann, and chronicles her decision to leave New York City. As she writes:

For me, New York is that guy I went out with only briefly and then successfully transitioned into friendship. We were always meant to be platonic. But in the years since I’ve moved away, I’ve learned that “I’m kind of meh on New York” is not a generally accepted point of view.

She goes on to describe New York as a “prom king,” someone who is great, knows it, and subsequently makes things difficult for the people who choose to love him. Because what are you going to do? It’s New York; you’re lucky just to be there, at least that’s what you’re supposed to tell yourself. The money quote:

A not-insignificant number of the vehement New York lovers I know — especially the young twentysomethings — are actually pretty unhappy day to day. I picture the prom king’s girlfriend sitting near him at the party, ignored but still kind of proud to be in the room and on his arm — and incredibly defensive should you suggest she break up with him for someone who dotes on her more. When I describe my West Coast existence (sunshine! avocados! etc.) to some New Yorkers, they acknowledge that they really like California, too, but could never move there because they’d get too “soft.” At first this confused me, but after hearing it a few times, I’ve come to believe that a lot of people equate comfort with complacency, calmness with laziness. If you’re happy, you’re not working hard enough. You’ve stopped striving.

I too meh New York, and while I’m grateful to have lived there (I guess? to the extent that I am grateful to have lived all the places I’ve lived), I am even more grateful not to live there anymore. The smell of hot blood was too strong for this Californian who occasionally likes to see the horizon!

The day’s second Friedman, Devin, published an article on/for/preposition GQ that everyone who has an hour to spare should go read. It’s a dark and twisty tale, but for those so inclined is a stranger than fiction true crime Craigslist narrative (I wonder if in ten years this will be a genre unto itself?). Friedman’s account had me at this sentence:

It’s like Rich’s Craigslist ad was designed for a certain kind of person: male, white, unattached, aging, no longer fostering unreasonable ambitions or fueled by fantasies about what he might turn out to be someday, someone on the downward slope of life for whom things maybe haven’t gone exactly as planned. It is sort of a retirement plan for the obsolete white man.

I’ll give you one guess on what happens next! Hint: the title of the article is “Craigslist Killers.”

For those of you who haven’t heard from The Media, the internet is currently being stalked –STALKED!– by a mythological creature with origins dating as far back as ancient Egypt (i.e. 2009 on the Something Awful forums), who has already claimed…well one victim for sure, but maybe two depending on whether or not this mother is correct in assuming that the reason her daughter tried to stab her was because of something the daughter read about on the internet and which the mother then read about on the internet, thus putting the pieces together.

There have been some interesting takes on the story, like this Slate piece in which journalist Katy Wladman frames Slenderman as the perfect metaphor for how we describe (and -erroneously- decry as aberrant) acts of violence, and I like certain sections of this Verge article as well, particularly the bits where author Adrianne Jeffries debunks the idea that there’s such an easy relationship between people who do crazy things and their media engagement practices (although it also does what most of the articles on the subject do and speak of the Slenderman character as if it has its own agency, which is weird because it’s a meme).

Over the last few days, I have been pouring over Jezebel’s reader-submitted scary stories. Last year’s thread is here, 2011’s thread is here, and this year’s thread is here; I’m not going to start reading this year’s till mid-week because I don’t want to spoil the holiday fun.

And can I just say, hot damn do I love stuff like this. Not only because FOLKLORE (I particularly like the ways in which people indicate that they are going into story mode; often they switch to the present-tense, and engage in all sorts of interesting metanarrative framing devices, from basic signal phrases like “anyway” and “so,” to almost sheepish caveats like “Normally I’m the kind of person who laughs at these sorts of stories” and “I know how crazy this is going to sound but”) but also because I just really really love scary stories. I grew up reading Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (the above image is one of my favorite illustrations from the series; it once hung proudly on the door to my office at the University of Oregon) plus of course R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps series and its sluttier YA cousin, Christopher Pike’s thriller/horror novels. And don’t even get me started on Are You Afraid of the Dark; that intro STILL makes me giggle nervously.

Needless to say, this is my favorite time of the year. And while we’re talking favorites, here’s my favorite story I’ve read so far, from user Desesszika. Spooky scary!

Okay, here goes.

A couple years ago I was living in Budapest. It was half study abroad, half hanging out with my family who lives in a town about 30 minutes south. Every once in a while I would take day trips with my friends. We’d drive to Slovakia or take the train to Austria, whatever we wanted. So on one of our trips to Romania (we intended to end up in Bucharest) our car shit out on us right at the boarder. One of my friends had family in Szeged which wasn’t too far away, but way too far to walk.

So the four of us decided to hitch hike.

We grabbed what we could out of the car and then called her family to tell them we were on the way. We locked up the car and made a sign that read Szeged, please. Got picked up in 5 minutes in a Barkas van. These happen to be my favorite and I was quite thrilled to get to ride around in one again.

The guy who picked us up, Andras, was very nice. He was very interested in where we were all from, what we liked to do, where we’ve traveled and what kinds of things we were studying. It started to get dark. Andras mentioned his family had a house not too far from where we were, and that we could stop there for the night and sleep since he was tired and didn’t know if he could drive us all the way to Szeged. We all kind of looked around at each other but ultimately agreed that it was rude to expect this nice man who picked us up to drive us all through the night.

Yes Andras was nice but driving up the dirt road to his house made all of the hairs on my arm stand up. I would later ask my companions and they said the same thing. All of us got silent as we tried to take in the scenery. It looked like any eastern European house set far back on what used to be a farm, with all of the old abandoned equipment around.

We unloaded and shuffled into his house which was very quaint and charming. He showed us into a room off the living room that we could all sleep in for the night. We all set out our sleeping bags and kind of congregated on the floor while Andras went into the kitchen. He started talking to his wife. “Honey i’ve brought back some travelers again” “they are all very nice, some of them are American!” “Yes of course I was going to offer them some brandy” which he did. He came back into the doorway of our room and offered us brandy. I passed but the others accepted.

He brought us out a tray and the rest of the bottle and then disappeared again. Eventually we all drifted off to sleep.

I woke up first, got dressed and went outside to pee. I ran into a little girl on my way back up to the house. She was incredibly shy. I asked her what her name was and if she lived there too. She said she did but she kept saying “but my father doesn’t believe me” I chalked it up to either my Hungarian being rusty or her being a kid but I told her to come back inside, it’s cold out. (She instead slunk back into an old mangled trailer she was playing in).

Inside the house I breezed past the kitchen with Andras screaming out “why are there not enough fucking eggs for our guests!?” “What kind of wife are you!?” But when I got back to the doorway of our room all of my companions were standing up, bags hastily packed mouths agape looking behind me.

I turned and that’s when I saw a scarecrow dressed up in women’s clothing sitting in an armchair at the far side of the living room. I turned back to my friends laughing and said “you guys are afraid of a scarecrow?” but just then Andras came through the door and picked the scarecrow up by the arm and flung it across the room. “You are the stupidest woman in the WORLD!” he howled. “I work so hard and you embarrass me!”.

He went back into the kitchen still screaming and now riffling through drawers. I turned to my friends and we all agreed that it was time to leave. Only the things Andras was saying got worse. “I killed the last one! I can kill you too!” type shit

We kind of stood as a group, frozen. My friend Lidi turned around and saw a window so we decided to jump through it to get out of the house. She was first out of the window. Only when she landed she made this weird squishing sound. My friend Jani popped his head out the window and then started screeching and backing away from it. At this point Andras was stabbing the scarecrow with a very real knife and we were all trying to just get the fuck out of the house. The two of us still in the house pushed Jani out of the window, not really caring why he was screaming because KNIFE. Finally I jumped out and landed in what I to this day pray was animal remains. Blood and guts. Filling this deep trench next to this guys house. There was also a LOVELY portrait of a family painted on the side of the house using what looked like the blood from the giant hole.

The four of us, bloody, shaking and still able to hear Andras killing his scarecrow wife hightailed it the fuck out of dodge back to the main road. We decided against getting into another car and instead ran all the way back to our old car. We also took a break from day tripping for a while.

Exams! Has god ever created a more irritating exercise in self-loathing and manic depression, designed to call attention to the terrible life choices that have brought one to academia? I don’t think so!

The categories you are apparently now pursuing (first of all, why) –Oh My God Exams, Folklore, Symbolic Power Y’all and/or Digital Culture– were designed as study repositories for a series of PhD qualifying exams I took in the Fall of 2011, then promptly forgot ever happened. Such, such, such are the joys. In case you were wondering wtf you were looking at!

Yesterday I ended up teaching my College Composition class about the joys of memetics, and challenged the assumption –made explicit in our reading for the day– that folklore generally, and urban legends in particular, must be transmitted orally in order to qualify as such. As evidence I told them the touching tale of several hot new teenage drug trends, first Jenkem and then the unfolding saga over vodka gummies, a story that’s been rumbling along quietly for the last few months and which has (d)evolved to include vodka-soaked tampon insertion and what the silly old willys in the lamestream media are describing as “butt-chugging,” which sure sounds like something kids today would do!

America’s hot new drinking trend

The lesson went over well, in part because –in this case anyway– folklore can be very funny. Folklore is also very easy to watch unfold, especially online, since all it requires is basic plausibility. And basic plausibility (at least in the “if you can cite it you can say it” sense) is one of the things that INTERNET does best. In some ways, folklore is the discipline best (“best” = not better as much as most naturally calibrated, in possession of an existing language etc) equipped to deal with online shenanigans. Verily was my saving grace after I defected from English, because BOOX???? In conclusion, poop-gas, it’s helping teach the Youth of America to read!

My examiner for this particular list provided a nice laundry list of all the shit I did wrong in the written portion, so my recap here won’t be so shot-in-the-dark. Thank god, because my BRAIN, it can only take so much.

So, instead of listing details for every single selection with a cute little recap I’ll group things together based on methodological approach. I’ll cross-list for research that does more than one thing, because these categories can get pretty messy pretty quickly. And having a sort-of flowchart will help prepare me for tomorrow’s firing squad.

I knew as I was writing my essay response that this would not be my finest intellectual hour — it was one of those deals where the question was working against me every step of the way, and at a certain point I just had to embrace the brainfuck. Whatever, it happens sometimes, and anyway I passed. The trick now is to figure out what to make of my examiner’s feedback. WE’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BOAT.